Trump's infrastructure plan expected to be released in January

President Donald Trump plans to keep pushing his legislative agenda in 2018 by releasing his long-promised infrastructure plan in early January, a senior administration official said.

Infrastructure advocates question whether a Republican-led Congress will be able to pass a spending plan with enough federal funding if it’s already approved a tax measure that official estimates say would bloat the budget deficit. Some say the administration missed its best opportunity to deliver a meaningful public works initiative by not incorporating it into the tax bill, which is nearing approval.

“If they’d taken up infrastructure, we’d have a bill today and have the money to fund it,” said Ray LaHood, a Republican and former U.S. transportation secretary under President Barack Obama. “Nothing happened this year, so the prospects of anything happening next year I think are pretty slim,” said LaHood, who is a co-chairman of Building America’s Future, a bipartisan coalition that promotes infrastructure.

Building materials stocks gained on the news. Martin Marietta jumped 5.1%, a session high, and was up 4.4% to $210.32 at 2:23 p.m. in New York. Vulcan Materials Co. climbed 3% to $124.78. Eagle Materials Inc. rose 1.9% to $113.79.

Trump promised

Trump promised during his campaign to introduce a $1 trillion proposal within his first 100 days in office, then the administration said there’d be a plan by the third quarter. That didn’t happen after the failed attempt to overhaul health care and the ongoing tax effort.

The president aims to release his proposal to upgrade roads, bridges, airports and other public works before the Jan. 30 State of the Union address, said the administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details aren’t public. Naysayers should wait until they see the details and how the legislative process unfolds, the official said.

The White House plan is essentially complete and Trump recently reviewed it, the official said. It calls for allocating at least $200 billion in federal funds over 10 years to spur at least $800 billion in spending by states, localities and the private sector.

The plan would put the federal dollars in four areas: cash for states and localities, with preference for entities that generate their own funding as well; formula block grants for rural areas; federal lending programs; and money for “transformational” work such as plans to build high-speed trains in tunnels by Boring Co., which was founded by Elon Musk.

Shift responsibility

The guiding principle of the plan is to shift responsibility for funding from the federal government to states and localities—which own or control most assets—by providing incentives for them to generate their own sustainable funding sources and work with the private sector.

Still, some governors and mayors have already balked, saying they’re doing their fair share and that much more federal funding is needed to meet what the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated to be a $2 trillion funding gap for infrastructure by 2025. Some advocates say the best chance was to include measures such as a higher gas tax or levies on corporate profits returned from overseas in the tax overhaul.

“We need to be honest with the American people: failure to find the revenue for an infrastructure initiative now, as part of tax reform, will make passage of such a package nearly impossible in the future,” Bud Wright, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, said in a letter last month to Senate leaders.

The White House official said it would have been too difficult to combine infrastructure with the tax bill. The plan now is to give Congress a blueprint for a bill and allow the details—including funding—to be negotiated in a bipartisan way, the official said.

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